


Only Child

by eris_of_imladris



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, or maybe not who knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 04:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20594444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris_of_imladris/pseuds/eris_of_imladris
Summary: “Every last one of them was crippled by disease or lost their mind or died. I was the only one left who could inherit the throne.”After the war, Edelgard discovers she is not the only living child of Emperor Ionius IX.Spoilers for Crimson Flower route.





	Only Child

The war’s effects were already beginning to fade, the farmers’ work looking so ordinary that the overwhelming conflict might never have happened at all. Conversation flowed as easily as the swaying sheaves of wheat made their way into baskets, plucked by expert hands.

Nothing was amiss, even with the Imperial party riding by, until the emperor’s horse suddenly stopped.

Fearing an attack, several guards drew their swords, heads jerking from side to side as they sought the enemy, vigilant for a disgruntled citizen of the former Alliance or Kingdom to leap out from the sheaves with a weapon in tow.

But no such thing came to pass. The emperor simply sat on her horse, reins slack in her hands, staring off to the side incredulously.

“Your Majesty?” a guard asked hesitantly before she dismounted, making her way over to a small group of farmers as Count Vestra followed steps behind, his words a mixture of confused and frantic. It wasn’t long enough after the war for calm to have pervaded their party.

“Excuse me,” she approached a small group of women, one older and three younger, with small children running between the sheaves and sometimes trying to help.

They bowed, and she waved a hand for them to rise. They looked expectantly, but she stayed silent for a long moment.

Eventually, she addressed one of the women, who looked utterly unremarkable but had apparently been enough to draw the emperor’s attention. She wore a simple frock, and her pale hair was bound up in a sloppy bun loose enough for some chunks to have fallen out. “Hello,” the emperor said simply, a hesitant smile forming on her face.

The woman stayed silent, but the older woman to her right spoke up. “My daughter does not speak, Your Majesty,” she said.

“Your daughter?” Edelgard asked, looking disappointed.

“Yes,” the farmer confirmed, looking around at the stopped soldiers on their horses and Count Vestra’s foreboding glare. “May I help you instead?”

Edelgard hesitated, tensing slightly, then proceeded, “If I may ask, was she born your daughter?”

The woman looked surprised, but shook her head. “She came to me some years ago.”

Words rushed out of Edelgard’s mouth. “Was it in the spring of 1176?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said the farmer, taken aback. “Do you know something of her?”

Edelgard froze, and half a step behind her, Count Vestra froze as well. “I did,” she said. “A very long time ago.”

_The only thing that kept her from losing her mind to the darkness was the fact that she was not alone. There were eleven of them, total, and even though most came from different mothers, they shared a father and a home and a small hope of leaving the basement alive._

_Most of Edelgard’s older siblings, in the beginning, had tried to fight. Many were trained fighters, but even they could not get past the insurrection that brought them here. And, in the darkness, other methods of fighting became even more important._

_Talking, singing, simply remembering their names could be enough to stem the tide of despair._

_Some, of course, were better than others. Those who stuck to themselves, especially the girls - it was remarked upon that the emperor had only three sons, and too many daughters - tended to get taken first._

_It was when they were leading Gertrude away, fifteen and tall and stocky, like a sheep to slaughter that Edelgard first discovered her oldest sister._

_She was older, even older than Theobald. But she lacked his willful strength and desire to get out of there. Instead, she filled the dank depths with music and practicality, dividing up food and keeping the little ones from crying too much. Edelgard was too old to cry much, but when Gertrude never returned, she found herself hunched with her back against the wall, tears streaming down her face._

_“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I’ll keep you safe.”_

_Edelgard was too old to cry, but she didn’t care. She gathered her into her lap as if she was as young as Helmut, and in the warmth of that embrace, she passed the night._

“We met in Enbarr,” Edelgard said after a short pause.

“Enbarr?”

“It’s not that far,” Edelgard said, thinking of the time it would take to reach the place she again called home. Unbidden, she thought of her last time in these fields, where she’d drawn her axe against her former classmates under the guise of a school tournament. “And it was many years ago.”

“Do you…” The farmer hesitated. “Do you know how she came to find her way here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Edelgard replied. “The last I knew of her, she was… I believed her to be dead.”

“She was injured when she came here,” the farmer said. “But… are you sure we are speaking of the same person?”

“Two scars, vertical, down the torso, varying depths but deepest in the middle, and other scars scattered around, I’m guessing,” Edelgard said matter-of-factly.

The farmer froze. “How did you…”

“We met,” she said. “And we were friends, once. Before the insurrection.”

There was nothing good to say here, and the farmer clearly knew it. The children, too, looked between emperor and matriarch with confused faces. Eventually, she asked, “Was Viv - was she a political dissident?”

“No, quite the opposite - and Viv?”

“She could not tell me her name, so I gave her one. Viveka.”

“That is not the name I knew her by,” Edelgard mused, looking over at the young woman who still hadn’t spoken. Such a contrast from how they met, not that Edelgard couldn’t understand. She, too, had danced close enough to the fire of madness to get burned.

_She hadn’t even known them all, thanks to her years in Faerghus, but Alva, the most patient of her siblings, explained who was who and what was going on. Not that she knew much, but she tried to explain away the screams and the coppery smell of blood, the way some left forever and others returned without their limbs or their minds only to disappear again later, for good._

_It seemed Alva was saved, almost as if she was a boy, for the way she could make the others be silent. But even so, she was not a boy, and even if she was, they could all tell from the angry tones and rushed scribbling that whatever the reason for their imprisonment was not going well._

_It was her turn, one day, as it was for them all. Helmut and little Hilde clung to her, and Edelgard had to fight an impulse to do the same. There were only the four of them by then, and whatever had happened to their brother Erik the week before made their captors very, very upset._

_“Only one boy left,” she’d heard them say. “We need a more reliable subject.”_

_Alva was the oldest left, and somehow, that made her the most stable. She did not shy away when they came to get her, nor did they even need to physically pry her away from her siblings. Hilde and Helmut wailed, but it was Edelgard who got her last words, Edelgard the now-oldest and the only one who could see to it that the little ones were safe._

_I’ll come back for you, El, she promised, and she walked off to her fate with her head held as high as it could go, even as little hands reached out for hers. She didn’t turn back, not even when her siblings called out for her._

_Some of them had already lost faith to follow her. If Theobald hadn’t come back, some of the older children didn’t believe Alva could either. But Edelgard followed, creeping along the sides of the room until she could see the door. It opened so rarely that her eyes were unaccustomed to the light, and all she could see was Alva’s hand rising to wipe at her eyes as she marched through the door._

“Do you remember me? It’s me, Edelgard,” she said, gently. The young woman looked up at her, blinking. “Or rather… you never called me Edelgard. You called me El.”

Count Vestra started a little at the word, looking again between the emperor and the farmer’s somehow-daughter. He looked the least confused of the outsiders assembled, as if something big was about to happen and only he knew about it. But time crept by, moment after moment dragging on with nothing to show.

“I’m not surprised,” Edelgard said. “She wasn’t the only one to…” Her words caught in her throat as she met the young woman’s eyes again, seeking something she did not find.

“If I may,” asked the farmer, “what exactly happened to her? I know it’s not my place to ask, but…”

“But she’s been living with you all of these years, and you haven’t the slightest idea why she is the way she is. I can’t tell you everything, but I can hopefully tell you enough to assuage your mind. Provided, of course, that our discussion does not… spread.”

“Of course not,” she bowed again, unsure of herself as she wrung her hands, all duty forgotten.

With a pointed look at the other nearby women, she was soon left alone with the farmer and the one she called her daughter. “I will tell you all I can,” she said, hoping for the strength to carry her through the story.

_True to her word, she did come back. But not the way Edelgard knew her._

_She startled at every noise, picked at her bandages the way she had told her siblings not to. The cuts were strangely even, her hair pale. Could she truly be the same person? And yet, no one else new had come since Edelgard arrived, no one to join the dwindling ranks of the emperor’s children._

_Edelgard tried calling out to her just as the little ones did, but nothing worked. There was just a vacant look in her eyes, occasionally punctuated by raw panic, but no words escaped her lips. Even when she woke the others by thrashing around on the floor in her sleep, she still never made a sound. Not even to Edelgard, who tried the best to mimic her stories and her songs and keep the little ones calm._

_When little Hilde was the next to go, Edelgard curled up by Alva’s side, not minding the bloody bandages or the strange hair as long as she had that simple physical comfort. She told Alva that she’d failed, and when Alva didn’t answer, she could pretend Alva forgave her._

_She was like that when they came for her. The last girl, the last chance to try everything that hadn’t worked on her sisters and brothers before her. She wasn’t surprised to see them coming for her, but she at least made sure Helmut found his way into Alva’s lap. He was so little still that he could fit, if he curled up tightly. And even if Alva didn’t remember how to speak, she remembered how to stroke his hair gently as she silently watched her last sister go._

“I don’t know what happened then. I was… indisposed.”

“Indisposed?”

“Gravely injured, close to death.” Edelgard couldn’t resist a small shudder.

“What happened, Your Majesty? Was this not before the war?”

The words stuck in her mouth. She could barely string two together when she spoke of this to Hubert. This woman was owed so much for taking care of Alva, for keeping her safe and keeping her alive, but there was simply too much in her mind.

She could answer that question in far too much detail, horrific things that would scare the few children still helping their parents nearby, things that might even make the farmer shy away from the responsibility she’d taken. Things that could make her seem like a monster, and all for a useless system that meant nothing.

Count Vestra took a few steps forward, placing a hesitant hand on her shoulder. She held it, with trembling fingers.

“I was indisposed and cannot speak of what happened in the meantime, but when I returned, she was gone. Since others had died in similar ways, I assumed that was what had happened, and never knew…”

That anyone would have cared for her. How did she even get out of that basement prison? What had happened in the meantime to demand her separation from Helmut, from Edelgard? Or was she simply forgotten in the jubilation of the experiment’s success?

_When she came back, the only one who waited for her was Helmut. His whimpers softened as she reached out her arms for him, even as the bandages strained. She thought she felt the drip of blood underneath, but she ignored it, running her fingers through his hair as he quieted. She had answered all of their questions correctly, and she could not ignore the excitement in their voices as they prodded at her and scribbled notes on complicated diagrams._

_She tried to ask about Alva, but was told to rest with a tenderness she did not know existed in their hearts. They told her to sit, brought some food and water, and watched as she picked apart a piece of bread and handed bits to Helmut as he asked her what felt like ten thousand questions._

_When the words piled up thick on her tongue, trying to tell Helmut of barbarity in the language of a child, she understood why Alva kept her silence. It was easier to not speak, but he had always been a frightful child (or perhaps he had not, when outside of the basement; if only she could ask someone who’d been in Enbarr longer), and there was a sliver of a chance everything would be fine for him._

_She knew enough from her captors’ smiles to know that something, at least, had worked._

_She realized, later that night, that she had forgotten her gender. Tradition preferred a male heir, and so, thus, did her captors. Giddy with success, they pried her hands open, babbling about blood and Crests and grabbing Helmut roughly by the hand._

_She didn’t realize how weak she was, how easily he could slip out of her arms even when his little fingers fought so hard to stay by her side. He was so young, she thought as his feet scrabbled for purchase on the floor. So young, far too young to inflict what she had just gone through. Was there even enough blood in his little body?_

_She drifted into unconsciousness when the door slammed, thoughts of the last day running through her mind. The knives, the chanting, the blood-splattered records of what had happened to those before. The way her Crest thrummed through her fingers and then there was a second, even more invasive force than the knives, the voices, the knives, the stench, the **knives** \- _

_She woke, alone, in a bed._

_That was not even close to the strangest part, but it took what felt like forever to not tense at the sheets on her skin, at the soft clothes she wore, at the way her breaths raised the blankets. It took even longer to smell something sweet in the air, and even longer for her eyes to drift away from the bed to see one of her captors standing at the foot._

_She blinked at him slowly. What could he possibly do here, now? Why was she out of the basement and in a soft white bed the same color as her hair, strange and new like Helmut had said?_

_“Helmut?” she asked, afraid of the answer. “Where is Helmut?”_

_The man tensed, mumbled something about “too soon.” And then, much to her astonishment, he bowed._

_She’d forgotten the way that looked, and no one had ever bowed so deeply to her before. She was only one out of eleven the last time she had been in a bed like this, her limbs tucked under the warm covers, the pain reduced to a dull throb._

_“Your Highness,” he said, and then, bluntly, “You are the only child of the emperor.”_

“She was my sister,” Edelgard finally admitted.

The farmer looked shocked. “I… I believed Your Majesty was an only child.”

“Most do,” she clarified. “It was easier, that way.”

“Easier?”

In her heart, she would say it was easier to try to forget, to move about her life with the best chance she had of being a halfway decent emperor. Wallowing in weakness would only take away the unnatural strength they had given her, the strength that had allowed her to throw them down at last.

“I cannot tell you how to fix anything, but I will assure you that the man who spearheaded this is imprisoned for life, and his henchmen are dead.”

Count Vestra flexed his fingers slightly.

“It was my greatest regret that I could not do more, but I will do what I can for her, and for you, going forward. You never need to worry about a bad harvest again.”

An uncomfortable silence fell over the small group.

“May I visit again?”

“Your Majesty, you may do whatever you wish,” the farmer said uncomfortably.

“I would not take her from this place, if it has been her home all these years, but it would be a comfort to me to see her again.”

Edelgard’s eyes found her sister again. How had she come here, so weak and alone? Had someone brought her, someone with half a heart even within the insurrection? Did a merchant chance to pick her up by the side of the road? Or was there more to her than met the eye?

Regardless, there was only one thing Edelgard could say. “Alva…I came back for you. I’ll keep you safe.” Hopefully, the peace she’d brought to the Empire would be enough.


End file.
